An hour or so with Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt's new coffee table book, "The Human Face of Big Data" confirmed what I have been thinking for a while. "Big data" can be both a blessing and a curse, but it's mostly a blessing.

The 233-page book is literally a weighty contribution to our understanding of big data. Lead author Smolan is a veteran photographer and book producer whose credits include the "A Day in the Life" book series. Published by Against All Odds, "The Human Face of Big Data" is available in print for $31.50 or as an iPad app for $2.99.

In his introduction to the book, contributor Dan Gardner points to Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1921 dystopian novel "We," where the author "imagines a future in which every building is made of glass so the authorities can see what citizens are doing at all times." Gardner wrote that some pessimists worry that it could, but he thinks "that the pessimists are too optimistic."

In documenting the extent to which every query we make, every status update we post and even every medical procedure we endure and how all that contributes to the oceans of data accumulated about each of us, book contributors paint a mostly positive picture of big data.

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The book is full of inspiring and lavishly illustrated stories, like how police officers in New York are using modern mapping technology to plot and solve crimes or how Australia's Marine Observing System hopes to protect species and unlock the oceans' secrets by collecting and analyzing terabytes of data from undersea sensors.

The potential for medical breakthroughs are unending. Silicon Valley's Proteus Digital Health, for example, makes "ingestible event markers" about the size of a grain of sand that enter the human digestive system to measure the impact of medications and send back data to smartphones.

At October's International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners in Uruguay, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith talked about how researchers were able to determine an adverse drug interaction between a popular antidepressant and another popular drug used to reduce cholesterol levels. When people included both drugs in a Bing search, "25 percent of the time they were also looking for information about how to deal with a headache or how to address fatigue or other symptoms associated with diabetes," he said. This discovery helped lead researches to conclude that these two drugs, when taken together, could lead to diabetes.

"The Human Face of Big Data" is a book that you probably won't read in one sitting but will want to keep around as a reminder of how our world is changing before our eyes. As the book points out, we generate 70 times the information contained in the Library of Congress every day-- and that number will grow with time.